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Player's guide
This page is largely opinion, not fact, and mostly covers the early game. There's also a strategy guide which, sigh, I hadn't noticed when I wrote this. The very basics When the game begins, four craftsmen will offer their services to you, and you'll pick one. Then, each day, you'll tell that craftsman what to produce, using up the raw materials in the storage bins in the middle of your shop. During the day customers will come in and request items - generally, initially, items you don't make, but you can try and suggest items you do make. At the end of the day you pay wages to your craftsman and can restock raw materials. After a few days, a second craftsman will volunteer their services, but after that you'll have to build workshops for them at a high cost. Tokens If you've got tokens - you might have got a hundred for free - resist the urge to spend them. If you go bankrupt, you'll lose whatever you spent them on, so you want to save your tokens until you know the game well enough to avoid bankruptcy. There's almost nothing you can buy with tokens that you can't also get ingame eventually. Isn't running out of days annoying? Yes. You CAN pay for more days, costing 50 tokens for 3 days, 90 tokens for 7 days, and 150 tokens for 14 days. Not really recommended, since days regenerate for free every half-hour anyway. Craftsmen Which craftsman should I hire initially? There are a number of opinions on this; you can get someone to recommend any of the four professions. My view is that what you really want is craftsmen with high crafting skills (the two rightmost skill numbers) and especially the "primary" skill (the left of those two rightmost numbers) at level 1. Any further improvements to crafting skills will come with training and an increase in wages, but a high base skill is free. Hence, I'd employ whichever applicant has the highest primary skill. Can I have more than one of a given type of employee? No, you can never have more than one employee of a given type. If you hire another, they replace your existing employee of that type. Can I fire an employee? No, except by replacing them with another employee of the same type. Should I hire a thug? No. Until the newbie protection wears out (the blue shield on the lefthand side of the screen), you're immune to the PVP game, and so a thug just soaks up wages - and you can't fire an employee, so you're going to keep being soaked for wages forever. Even after that, it may be a long time before other players' thugs cause you any annoyance. Changing craftsmen As long as you've still got level 1 craftsmen and most of your applicants are level 1 - making it easy to compare base skills - you might as well swap any time a level 1 craftsman applies with a higher crafting skill. Sure, you lose a bit of experience, but generally you have more experience on craftsmen than you need. Training craftsmen Training craftsmen increases their wages, so don't do it without a good reason. You might train craftsmen because you need to increase their level in order to research more items, or because they can't keep up with demand for their items. In the latter case, improving crafting skills to multiples of 25 is a good idea, because most items cost a multiple of 25 to build. What does that star mean? When a craftsman awaiting orders has a star above their head not a question mark, they have enough experience to be trained up at least one level. How do I get a second craftsman? After playing for a bit, a second workshop will become available automatically. How do I get a third craftsman? You can buy a third and fourth workshop by clicking on the chest. It costs 25,000, and you should aim to have a few thousand gold left over after building it - and read about guilds and improvements, below. Why can't I research this item? Some items need two craftsmen to work together. You can't research or produce them until both craftsmen are free. You can tell which craftsmen are needed by the tiny icons at the bottom of the dialogue box when picking an item to research. Some of these items will take different amounts of labour from the different craftsmen, and so they will finish at different times. This makes them a pain to produce, and if you want to make a stack, you'll have to do some arithmetic to give the faster craftsman a job that takes up just enough of their time to be ready again when the slower one finishes. I try and avoid suggesting them because of this difficulty. Some items just need a higher craftsman level than you currently possess. The aforementioned icons glow red when you don't have enough of something. Buying and selling Market and profit Whenever you buy or sell an item, the offered price is shown, along with "profit" and "market". The "profit" number is effectively always positive, and shows the difference between the offered price and your cost for manufacturing the object. The "market" number is often negative, and shows the difference between the offered price and the "market price" of the object. The market price is a nominal value for the object; there is no market where you can buy and sell objects at these prices. It is also high - until you build up market affinity, you will expect to always see prices offered below the market price. Should I haggle? Generally not. Haggling is not often successful, although it is more likely to succeed if the offered price is especially low (or high, if the item is being sold to you). I only ever haggle if the offered price is one I'm actually unwilling to accept. The exception is items I don't make. If you're going to turn a profit on these at all, you tend to need to haggle the buy and sell prices. An item you do make is cheap, and you should be able to produce more than you can sell. If a lousy price is offered for one of these, the choice isn't between selling the item for the lousy price and selling it to someone else later for a high price - you can sell another one for a high price later. But if it's an item you don't make, you can only sell the one that you have - might as well have a good price. That said, it's worth remembering that all sales get you XP. If your shop is generally financially healthy, taking a modest loss on an item you don't make is arguably worth doing. Raw materials If you run out of raw materials, craftsmen stand idle and collect wages. It's nearly always worth expanding your raw material storage if you run out during a given day. If an adventurer offers to sell you rare materials at 625 gold, always accept if you have the money. This is the only way of obtaining these materials (except tokens). When adventurers offer normal materials, the ones you can buy at the end of the day with gold, they charge 20% more. It is only worth buying these if you were likely to run out during the day. Suggestions Check out Customers and the item acceptance matrix. I have these pages constantly open in tabs as I play. You should always suggest an item the customer type accepts, or you will get an automatic failure. Beyond that, it is best to suggest a similar item; if the customer requests a weapon, suggest a weapon if you can. If you suggest an item, the price will be the same proportion of the market price as was the case for the customer's originally requested item. This means that if someone comes in requesting a cheap item at well above the market price, you might try suggesting a very expensive one. Which skills are best? This section is even more a matter of opinion than the rest of this page. Fame and Market Affinity. Fame attracts more customers. For most of the game, you'll be able to produce more stuff than you can sell, even if you avoid needless levelling up of craftsmen; high Fame cuts down on that problem, and of course more customers means more money. Market Affinity raises average offer prices. This is obviously desireable. Why not the adventurer-attracting skill? This comes into play later in the game, but early on giving items to questing adventurers is difficult because you only have a limited range of items and you cannot afford to gamble on them failing quests. Why not Silver Tongue? Because you aren't going to haggle very often, whereas Market Affinity improves every single price you are offered; and you can't both suggest an item and haggle the price, but Market Affinity improves the price on suggested items. Silver Tongue also improves the success of suggestions, but later in the game that will not be important because you are very likely to have stocks of whatever the customer desires. Market Affinity and Fame will continue to pay off even in the later game. Quest lines Someone asked me for money Sometimes someone will come to your shop and ask for money - a homeless beggar, a scammer pretending to be a taxman, your landlord, etc. Always pay these people if it won't bring you close to bankruptcy. If it will, tell them to come back later and start saving up cash. All these requests for money unlock series of missions that give greater benefits later. Are you sure I should give money to the...? Yes. I gave out all that money like you said, but nothing happened Check the requirements lists for quest lines. Most of the early quests need worker levels and some combination of carpenter, tailor, and blacksmith. Woohoo, I just got 25,000 for looking for a clover bag This is the first quest. Don't spend that 25,000 on a third workshop - both for the reasons listed above, and because other quests are about to hit you up for 10,000 or so. Expand your material storage and enjoy the sensation of being in no danger of bankruptcy for the foreseeable future. Guilds and improvement points Why is the chat constantly full of "trade 1k carp for 1k tailor"? What does it mean? See Improvements. Basically, when you build a shop improvement (by clicking on the chest at the back of the shop), other players have to give you "improvement points" to complete it. All craftsmen generate these improvement points, but you can't use your own, so players are always wanting to trade them. I need a guild! No, you don't. Guilds don't give benefits in the way they do in many MMOs, and they cost you money. No, you're wrong. I do really need a guild to finish this shop improvement No, you don't, or not for more than 30 seconds. Guilds cost you money every day after the first - potentially a lot - and don't get you any benefits. Instead, you can agree a trade of improvement points on the chat channel, and be in a guild with your trade partner for 30 seconds. OK, how's all that work? First of all, you need the money for your shop improvement. A third (or fourth) workshop is 25,000. You don't want to build it the instant you have 25,000, though; besides various quests hitting you up for gold, if you do that you've got no money, an extra wage to pay, and not very much extra stuff to sell. I try to keep at least 5,000 in the bank - more if the shop is not very profitable. Select the chest at the back of the shop and pay for your improvement. Now the list of improvements will show you the faces of the four craftsmen and the number of "improvement points" you need from each one. Your craftsmen build up these points, but you can't use your own points on your own improvements. When a craftsman's waiting for orders, you can see the number of points they have built up to the right of the level-up bar. If you haven't done this before, you almost certainly have 1,000. Go onto the chat channel and propose a trade; for example, "1K smith offered for 1K carp/sorc". When you agree a trade, one of you should create a guild and invite the other; the row of little buttons at the top of the screen lets you send invites and accept them. Now return to the same craftsman and click Improve. You'll see a list of your partner's improvements under construction. If there's more than one, make sure you are adding your points to the right one. Click on the improvement, confirm the number of points to add. Now return to the list of improvements in the chest at the back of the room and wait for your partner's points to arrive. Finally, leave the guild. What if I give someone my points and they don't give me theirs? I'm not saying this never happens, but it's never happened to me. You say guilds have no benefits, but what about thug defence? Doesn't matter until some time after newbie protection runs out. So after all that, where's my nice new workshop? If you've got the improvement points in hand, it's a known bug. Reload the game.